Truman Capote lived in Brooklyn by choice , and so did I , once … Brooklyn Heights , to be more accurate . Actually , the northerly part of Brooklyn Heights , if you want to be even more exact . Or , more on the nose , Cranberry Street — the little three - stoppage long street where the moviesMoonstruckandThree Days of the Condorwere film .
When I first moved to Brooklyn from SoHo some twelve years ago , friends called me a groundbreaker , as if I ’d just harbinger that I was pick up and be active to Chechnya or Gaza . Now , of course of action , it ’s considered coxa to live in Brooklyn . What people do n’t realize , however , is that to many author , Brooklyn always was the rosehip place to experience . For representative , my petty brownstone on Cranberry street was two city block from where Thomas Paine lived and write . I was two pulley from where Walt Whitman typeset hisLeaves of Grass . I was five blocks from where Truman Capote wroteBreakfast at Tiffany ’s . I was 20 - some - odd blocks from where Marianne Moore pennedWhat are Years ? Five blocks from where Hart Crane wroteThe Bridge , 13 block from where Thomas Wolfe wroteOf Time and the River . Four blocks from where Betty Smith wroteA Tree farm in Brooklyn . Ten blocks from where Arthur Miller wroteDeath of a Salseman . Three closure from where Anais Nin lived . Five blocks from where Norman Mailer wroteThe Naked and the Dead . One block from where Carson McCullers wroteBallad of the Sad Cafà © . Two block from where W.H. Auden lived and wrote . Sixteen blocks from where Norman Rosten lived , and less than a block from ( my brownstone in reality share a backyard with ) the house that Paul and Jane Bowles called home for more than a decennium .
And there are a pantload more .
Alfred Kazin , Tennessee Williams , Chaim Potok , Woody Allen , Neil Simon , Cristina Garcia , Derek Walcott , Willaim Styron , Hubert Selby , Phillip Roth , Bernard Malamud , Paul Auster , Harriet Beacher Stowe and Isaac Basheva Singer have all , at one point or another , lived and act in Brooklyn . As well as a whole lot of vernal authors like Elizabeth Gaffney , Spike Lee , Dave Eggers and Rick Moody . The Jonathans : Jonathan Ames , Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Letham . And up - and - coming source like Lucinda Rosenfeld and Amy Sohn .
The motion is : Why ?
Why have so many writers been drawn to Brooklyn ? What is it about the big of the five borough that bedazzles and beguiles ? What ’s the allure ?
Is it that Brooklyn tends to leave you alone — to stay off your back , as a friend of mine is fond of saying ? Or is it " the way in which the scurvy lay of the acres and open light here , the surfeit of seeable sky , assign the bold delirium and built - in ego - grandness of city exist in some view , isolates you on sidewalks or at windows in your own thoughts beneath the wide empty press of a day,“ as Brooklyn aboriginal and author Charles Siebert has compose ? Or is it just tawdry rent ?
